Podcast S8E6 | Lessons From a Former CEO: Dame Inga Beale

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberley Cole 0:01
This is Risky Women Radio, a show that connects, celebrates and champions women in risk regulation and compliance. We’re here to share the insights on the biggest issues in our industry and hear inspiring journeys from our global members. Sign up to our newsletter at riskywomen.org. I’m Kimberley Cole, your Chief Risky Woman.

Carol Beaumier 0:22
Hello. I’m Carol Beaumier. I’m a senior managing director with Protiviti. I’m joined today by Dame Inga Beale. Dame Inga Beale is a British businesswoman with over four decades of experience in the global financial services industry, including a five year tenure as the first woman CEO of Lloyd’s of London, where she led the firm through a global transformation. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017 for her services for to the UK economy. Today, among other things, Dame Inga serves as the chair of the board for South Pole. She also sits on the board of directors of NN Group, Crawford & Company and Willis Towers Watson (WTW), and I’m very pleased to say she is also an advisory board member to my firm, Protiviti. Throughout her career, Dame Inga has been a staunch supporter of organizations that work toward a more inclusive society and support the development and promotion of top female talent, her leadership and her commitment to inclusion and innovation have earned her numerous accolades and have made her a role model for future generations. So Dame Inga, thank you so much for joining me today.

Inga Beale 1:35
Oh, well, thank you, Carol. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Carol Beaumier 1:38
There are so many topics we could explore today, but I’m going to keep my questions in two broad areas, first on company transformation, and then on the role of women in business. So if we could start with transformation. Transformations, as we know, can be difficult for a whole host of reasons. Looking back on your experience, what were the biggest challenges you faced when implementing a transact…a transformation program, and how did you manage through those?

Inga Beale 2:06
Well, yes, and today, there’s hardly a business that’s not having to transform in some way so. But I got a bug. I got a sort of change bug. When I worked for a big American company. They took me to their home office away from London in the UK, and they asked me to do a massive change program, which was introducing technology. And that was when I got the bug for driving change and transformation. And that was 25 years ago today. But my biggest challenge in terms of driving transformation, I think, would have been my last executive role as the CEO of Lloyds of London. Lloyds is such a unique place, seeped in history over three centuries of tradition, and fundamentally, when I was asked to join the business had grown dramatically over those centuries, and they were doing business in almost every single country and territory in the world, but the way they were doing business, the way they were doing insurance deals, was on paper. So this was now 2014 but they were doing business on paper in the same way that they had done 325 years earlier! And partly because it had been so successful, no one really thought they needed to change. But the board knew very well that the pace of change in the whole world was was very fast, very dramatic, and if Lloyds didn’t introduce a new way of working, change the way that they were all dealing with each other, doing business together, and move away from this old fashioned, paper based process, they would start losing business because they would be just seen as somewhat sort of old fashioned museum. So I was hired to introduce technology to the market, and today, of course, we’ve got these conversations about artificial intelligence and quantum computing. I’m not talking about anything fancy. I’m talking about technology 101. Put in some technology to get rid of the paper. And so it was basically a sort of electronic trading platform. It was a marketplace, or Lloyds is a marketplace, so hundreds of companies doing business together, but instead of people physically talking about everything and looking at sheets of paper with information on on the table or the desk, replacing all of that with technology so that then we’re looking at a screen together, and they were confirming coverages and pricing and assessing the risk using technology. So that was it. And I have to say the biggest resistance was that people didn’t think they had to change, right? Because they’ve been so successful over all those years that actually they were a very homogeneous group of people. So no one was in there actually saying Let’s change it. And then also because some of my predecessors had failed in their attempts to modernize, people said, You didn’t include us in designing our journey. So I learned two things right at the beginning of that I have to include them in designing their own future, and I have to get some different people into the market who have new ideas and new ways, new new approaches to the way we can work.

Carol Beaumier 5:26
So having established that as you went through the program, because these programs tend to take a long time as well, did you find that you had to make course corrections? And if so, how did you do that without losing support or losing credibility for what you were trying to accomplish.

Inga Beale 5:43
Well, we did, because we worked in quite an agile way. Because to me, I think the days of this, you know, the old days where we worked years and years on implementing, say, a new system, and everything had to be perfect, and it was a Goliath of a system. We didn’t take that approach. We knew that technology was advancing so quickly that we needed to be very agile, which meant sometimes we launched things very quickly and they weren’t quite right, but we knew we had to do that to keep up with the pace of change, and so we did have cou… to course correct, but it was always based on feedback of what we gone out, perhaps with a small group, a pilot group with we said, test this. Let us know the feedback. We’ll refine it. And all of this was happening at pace, but also I made some mistakes along the way, and sort of did things without that consultation process. And as in a group executive, we made some key decisions and then just suddenly rolled things out. And some of those backfired on me because we hadn’t given due consideration for people, and then we didn’t necessarily course correct. We sort of still went on with what we thought was the right thing, but I did have to show my vulnerability and go and say, Actually, we’ve made a mistake. We’ve got this slightly wrong. We thought this was the right thing to do. We’re actually going to just change it a little bit based on your feedback. So we did have to do a lot of that, but because the whole program was based on this agility and this openness around communication and actually knowing that not everything was going to be right first time, it worked for us.

Carol Beaumier 7:23
Yeah, and it almost sounds like the course corrections actually help build credibility for the program because people felt as if they were being heard.

Inga Beale 7:31
Yes, that’s right.

Carol Beaumier 7:32
I think you answered this in part already. But what leadership skills do you think were really critical to leading, or are critical to leading the transformation program?

Inga Beale 7:44
Well, you’ve got to have the courage to want to make the change happen. And it was very interesting for me, because the board hired me, wanting me to be this dramatic change agent. But when I went to them and said, This is what we need to do, it was almost a bit too much for them. And some of them were saying, Oh no, no, no, we didn’t. We didn’t quite mean that much. But so you’ve got to have the courage of your convictions. You’ve got to sort of have that courage to be bold and to say, actually, though this is the right thing to do, we are going to do this. You also need a lot of resilience, because particularly, some people love change, as I do, but a lot of people, they are a bit resistant to it. It’s the uncertainty. It’s the fear of that unknown, what it will mean for them and and so you you it’s a roller coaster ride. Some things go well, some things don’t go so well. And so you need a lot of resiliency. You need to be resilient and to be able to not always be knocked back so much by by things that don’t go smoothly as you want, you know, and even if they do, then you’ve got to be able to pick yourself up and carry on. But also listening. Often, we underestimate the importance of listening as a leadership skill, but to me, this was the absolute essence, and it didn’t mean just asking for input and feedback and making notes of things. It meant really listening, taking note of what they were saying, and perhaps giving them a response, saying, actually we like that idea, or we don’t like that idea, and this is why. So the listening to me was very, very important.

Carol Beaumier 9:15
So I’m going to guess that resilience and listening will continue to be important traits. But you mentioned previously, at the time that you embarked on this transformation, we weren’t talking about AI. We weren’t talking about quantum we are now. So maybe in a broader context, tell me how you think leadership skills may have to change in the future to manage a transformation, or just to manage a company.

Inga Beale 9:41
Well, many times now you’ll have leaders who will be unsure, uncertain, lacking some knowledge about some of this new stuff that’s coming along. And I would I know, therefore, that leaders have to be very open to be learning from others. They have to learn to be able to trust others. They may know fewer and fewer answers. They may be a fantastic motivator. They might be able to set a wonderful vision, but they’re going to have to rely a lot more on expertise, to input, to to what they want, to how, the way they want to lead the organization forward. And I have to say, traditionally, I tended to know the answers. You know, if I think about my leadership journey over the last 40 years, I learned a lot, and I always seem to know the answer, and I felt quite confident. But I think a lot of the leaders today, with this rapid development of this stuff, they might be going, Oh, I don’t really know enough about that, and they might lose a little bit of confidence. You’ve got to be able to trust and really dig into the expertise of others. And then that communication is going to be key. So communicate, communicate, communicate to everybody. Because again, there will be a lot of fear about the unknown, and you need to try and bring everyone in your organization along with you. And of course, sometimes your customers, because it’s you know, remember, some of your customers may be some of them may be demanding things. Some of them may be very fearful of what this will mean. Will their service be better? Will it be worse? Will the product offering be better or worse? And all of this, these sorts of things. So this idea that you’ve got to really work with people is going to continue. People today are not going to be happy with just being ordered around and told what to do. So this idea that you can actually bring people along with you and develop things together is going to be a very important thing.

Inga Beale 11:36
Does that imply that we need to look for different types of people to be leaders in the future? Is it a different market for leaders?

Inga Beale 11:44
Yeah. And I think, Well, I think the way I look at leadership these days is that it all. It can depend what stage your business is in, or your organization is in. Whether it’s really leading edge, whether it’s stuck in the past, and you need to take a few, you know, modernizing steps, if it’s very customer focused, if, you know, there are many aspects to this. So I wouldn’t like to say that there’s only one leadership style. And in fact, when I was at Lloyds, I felt I was the right person then, because I was so, I was so pushing the boundary for the market, because it needed it at that time to sort of accelerate things and get things moving. But then after that initial acceleration, the ball started to roll a bit more on its own, and there was enough knowledge and innovation happening in the market because we embedded an innovative culture. So actually, it didn’t, perhaps need someone as as sort of out to the left field as me. So I think each business actually will need a certain type of leader for a certain period of time in its development, in its journey.

Kimberley Cole 12:55
This episode is brought to you by Protiviti. Protiviti is a global consulting firm with deep expertise in transformation, risk management and compliance, partner with Protiviti.

Carol Beaumier 13:11
So let’s turn now to women in business. So maybe I could ask you to tell me, first of all, was there a turning point or a particular moment that significantly impacted your career trajectory?

Inga Beale 13:27
Several! But I know we haven’t got all day to talk, so I’m going to I’m going to start with one, which was the very first thing that happened to me in terms of my step onto the career ladder. I had actually been working for 12 years by this stage. I was working in the financial services sector in the heart of the London financial district, the City the City of London. I was working there. I’d been there for 12 years. Never managed anyone. I was I was a I was a team contributor. I was an underwriter. And it never had occurred to me to be promoted and sort of be ambitious, and look up there and think it’s just, you know, I want that top job. But the company I worked for, it had a talent management program, and it was specifically looking at who was making up their leadership and saying, Oh, this doesn’t look as though it’s representing the world, the world population. It doesn’t look as if it’s representing the overall working population anywhere. So they wanted to do something about it. And they said, Look, we’re going to have a specific element of our program, our talent management program, which is going to be for women. And they were proactively promoting women, and this was in the 90s, so I’m talking 1994 I’m not talking anything today, and we’re still sort of debating a little bit about this, but they were pushing targets for their managers back in the 90s to say, you’ve got to start promoting women, because they knew that their pipeline was so narrow to get up to the top. So I was one of those women who was proactively promoted, because I was a woman, and there was I was working in a very male environment, so there was no one else to promote. I was the only one, you know. So I got the promotion, and at first I actually said, No, I was so nervous I didn’t have the courage to actually take it at that time. I’ve changed a lot since then. But the company supported me, the the CEO of the business, I was in London at the time for this big US company, and the CEO in London, he really wanted to get his bonus, but he wanted to promote me. So the company supported me. He supported me. They got me over that hurdle of not having that confidence, and then I took the job, and fundamentally, that was the sort of start of learning how much I, I love to lead people and and that was my leadership journey. And it didn’t stop. And I got to be the CEO of Lloyds. And it’s quite amazing, because in the 80s, when I joined the insurance sector, Lloyds, to me, looked like the most frightening place to a young woman like I didn’t want to go in the building. It was so scary. And then I ended up being the CEO all those years later, and I had no, no idea that that would happen to me, but it was fundamentally because of that, that head start well, that that help I got from that company, yeah.

Carol Beaumier 16:18
That’s great. So I also came up in the financial services industry. So tell me, from your perspective, how did you handle the biases you encountered through your career?

Inga Beale 16:30
At the beginning, I was, I was kind of angry. I think, I mean, what I did when I really first started work, was I try to not stand out. You know, this is what you do, right? You’re one of you’re the only one, you’re the different one, the odd one out. And at first, I did not want to be different. I really didn’t. I wanted to be the same. I wanted to blend in. So I behaved as much like a man as I could. I, you know, I did all the things that I could socially with the men, the male my male co workers and colleagues, just so that I could fit in and not stand out. That was sort of my initial initial approach. But then a few things happened, and then I got very angry and I got resentful and things like that. And so I sort of went through a phase then, in fact, I did walk out of a job once when a sexist thing happened. And I vowed to myself, I’d never work in financial services again. I went off traveling for a year, completely on my own with a backpack. I hadn’t planned this, so I hadn’t saved up any money, so I was doing it on the cheap, but I really didn’t think I could stick it out this anger, and I had no intent to really fix it, I just went off. But after a year out, I learned a lot. I met a lot of interesting people, particularly when you’re backpacking around the world with no money, you meet very interesting people. And I just grew a lot myself, and I ended up going right back to my employer that I’d walked out on a year later, a year earlier. So that’s how it worked out for me. But that was it. But later on, I as more more I became a manager and leader of people, and I realized I don’t know, I was much more aware of some of the biases, and I thought, I’ve got to do something about this. So I started giving talks. Any women’s network event that came along, I would sort of give a talk, and then I would, I would get feedback from people saying, Oh, that was so inspirational. You know, I’ve just, I’ve just had this experience or whatever, and I was able to give little tips about something that I’d experienced and and how, how I got over it, and my approach to it. And then I suppose the more senior I got, yes, I still had some biases, but you’re less aware of them when you’ve got to be the CEO. And in fact, you’re not so aware of what’s still going on. And I was at an a networking event in London, in the insurance market with it’s a women’s network that’s been going for some years. And I was speaking to the 30 somethings, maybe early 40s, and I asked them, How is it? Because I assumed it would be very different to my world when I was their age. And they said, some of them said, it still feels like a battleground, not all the time, but every now and then, it just feels like I’m in a battleground and I’m not really one of the chosen ones. So I know that there are still some biases going on, and often it’s the small things. You know, the policies and practices that firms put out or organizations put out, they’re one thing, but it’s the little, behavioral things, the little comments, and they can build up, you know, whether it’s microaggressions or, as we call, you know, they can build into micro stresses for you, if it’s this sort of constant little negativity, and they’re the things that are the most difficult to solve in an organization and also the most perhaps difficult for an individual to to handle.

Carol Beaumier 20:01
So I was going to ask how much progress you think you’ve seen over your career, and how do we make more progress?

Inga Beale 20:10
Well, I know that there’s been progress because, you know, you used to be able to count on your hand the number of female CEOs of insurers around the world. Now, two hands isn’t enough. So I know that there’s been progress. It doesn’t necessarily feel that it’s been at the right pace. And if you look globally at all levels and outside of financial services, we know that that that sort of parity of pay and everything for women, you know, men and women, it’s going to take way beyond my lifetime to resolve. It’s, you know, we’re making snail pace progress ultimately, but in some respects, in financial services, they have made efforts over the years. So I’ve seen some steps up. And I’ve I’ve seen things happen, and I do get asked often to give talks to organizations. How you know from my based on my experience, how can I help you put in a program, or what do you need? And I say, know what you actually need to ask more the women of today, because I believe that my knowledge of being in my 30s, it’s out of date now. The world has changed, and it’s very important, I think, to speak to the people involved who are working for you, to say, what do you need? What’s wrong? And ERG’s, employee resource groups., they are a valuable source of this. Whereas you know, you can, you actually go to them, you say, right, what do we need to do differently? They can be part of even product development to say, actually, we, our product suite for this group of people is not very strong. How can we make that more robust and things like that. So, there are, there are, you know, I’m not trying to sort of dodge a question about what needs to be done. There are things you know you absolutely need to look at your policies and practices and and set targets. I’m a great believer in that. You know, if you start measuring what you’re doing, you will get results and changes. So I do regard, no we need to do that, but in terms of what we’ve discovered about the behaviors and things in the workplace. I think it’s today’s generation of workers that you’ve you’ve kind of got to ask for their ideas, yeah.

Carol Beaumier 22:27
Fair enough. So my last question, what would you tell the young woman who’s starting out in business today who aspires to be a leader? What’s your best advice?

Inga Beale 22:36
Yeah, well, I didn’t learn this very early on. I learned it later on in my career, but I learned about the PIE model, p, i, e, it’s very simple, and there may be other acronyms and other ways to describe this, but I learned this quite late on. You’ve got to have all three of them. You’ve got to have the P, the I and the E. The P is the performance. So you’ve got to do well at your job. So make sure, as you’re starting out on your career, you get known for a great to be a great expert in something. So my recommendation is always, don’t go too broad, because you need to be able to really excel in something early on, become an expert and really be able to perform. So the P is the performance. You’ve got to focus on that, but also think of your I, your image. Just think of how you’re coming across to people. And usually you have to ask others, because often you don’t know. You think you might be coming across like this, but actually, until you hear the feedback from others, you don’t really know. So always get good, open, honest feedback, and seldom do we like to do that in the workplace, but I encourage you to seek it out. So work on your image, know and actually understand how you’re coming across. And then the third piece is the E, the exposure. Oh, you need to work on this. You’ve got to be strategic about it. Means you’ve got to really think about who you’re getting exposure to who, if you’re going to a networking event in person, don’t you normally just go to the people you already know. No, you mustn’t. You’ve got to go to the people you don’t know. If you if you can work with your line manager, you can actually say, look, may I stand in or attend this in your place because you’re not available for this meeting. They can help you do that. They can make introductions. You can have mentors. Work on the exposure, because the more senior you get, the more important that is. It’s who you know. So the exposure almost is the bigger piece of the pie that you need to focus on.

Carol Beaumier 24:37
Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your story and your advice with us.

Inga Beale 24:41
Thank you, Carol.

Kimberley Cole 24:44
Thank you for listening to this episode of Risky Women Radio, be part of the ongoing conversation and learn more about our events and other programs at riskywomen.org